Five

Abbas Kiarostami, who looks at the world around him not only as a film maker but also as a poet, theatre maker and photographer, moved into the field of video art with Five. Five is an exploration of possibilities of digital audio and video while also investigating the fading boundaries of documentary practice. The film comprises five longshots of a beach where Kiarostami observes a whole universe of change. Five scenes, five long recordings, no actors, no script. The cast is made up of a series of walkers, ducks, dogs, a piece of driftwood and the light reflected on stormy water. Filmed on the stormy coast of the Caspian Sea, Five shows pictures of both day and night, motion and stillness, man and animal.The Iranian master conceived this radical minimalist film as an ode to Yasujiro Ozu on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. As earlier in Taste of Cherry and ABC Africa, Kiarostami uses the off-screen sounds in such a way that they offer spectators the opportunity to develop the scenes further in their own heads. The camera work and the editing clearly bear the signature of Kiarostami. The exceptionally beautiful music that is heard between the scenes is not included in the credits, but is more than worth a mention. (EC)